Unbecoming Women

Susan Fraiman is professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her Columbia University Press publications include Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins (2017) and Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003).

Susan Fraiman argues persuasively that an antiromantic, oppositional, even subversive tradition is intrinsic to canonical "women's fiction"--perhaps accounting for its continued vitality. She makes her case by careful, shrewd, highly readable readings of four well-loved, respected "classics" by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. From the first chapter--about the conduct books for girls that nourished the roots of courtship novels--to the brilliant final contention that the ending of The Mill on the Floss challenges not only the genre of the Bildungsroman but the ideology of individualism, Fraiman is logical and pellucid, sometimes colloquial, often witty, and always accessible. Embedded in current political and critical concerns and debates, this book is never overwhelme or deflected by them. This is a subtle work of sophisticated literary criticism with a sound moral center--gratifying to read.